T.S. Eliot - Morning at the window

In my quest for finding a topic to write about, I've come up with poem called "Morning at the window" and I've decided to write about it owing to the fact that it really caught my attention, it's written by one of the authors reviewed in our lessons, T.S. Eliot and also because I think that clearly comprises a lot of elements which characterize modernism.

Here is the poem:

Morning at the Window - T.S. Eliot 

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,

And along the trampled edges of the street

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids

Sprouting despondently at area gates.

 

The brown waves of fog toss up to me

Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts

An aimless smile that hovers in the air

And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

This is an imagist poem which represents a clear image of poverty and decay immerse on a modern city with a life style very mundane and miserable. The speaker is located at the window seeing the life of other people out in the street and he describes that picture showing how the mundane life of those people is, the speaker's perception of the person and that person's life, meaning that through the image, the speaker is conveying his own perception.

In addition to this, the deterioration and decadence of society and city life is made explicit through words such as "trampled edges" of the street where they live, "damp souls", "twisted faces" of unhappy people, "aimless smile" which vanishes among the polluted ("brown waves of fog") city roofs, among others, which can be related to the "pessimist" (in a certain way) view of modern writers.

Moreover, other modern characteristic that can be identify is the isolation, in this case, the isolation of the speaker, since he is apart from everything that is happening outside his window, he's "aware of the damp souls" and he hears the "breakfast plates" but he is not in contact or in communication with them neither a part of the reality that he describes.

Finally, the issue that caught my attention was that, in spite of the fact that this poem was written in 1917, nowadays that image has not changed that much, since we can still see people out in the street isolated from each other walking down the street, going to work with a unexpressive face, and so on, making very explicit that the topics covered by modern writers are still present and prevalent in our society.